Phenology and life history of two reunited weevil biocontrol agents (Coleoptera: Curculionidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Larinus minutus Gyllenhal (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) has been credited with the successful biological control of Centaurea diffusa Lamarck (Asteraceae) in British Columbia, Canada. However, another seed head-feeding weevil agent, Bangasternus fausti Reitter (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), has recently been detected on C. diffusa in British Columbia, and it is unclear how it is interacting with L. minutus . If phenological differences between the two species allow B. fausti to exclude L. minutus from seedheads, and if B. fausti continues to have a low survival rate, populations of C. diffusa may begin to resurge. As a first step in studying the interactions of L. minutus and B. fausti , we compared their phenology and life histories across their known Canadian range and explored the relationship between their abundance and environmental predictors. We quantified adult abundance in the field and collected seed heads from which we reared each species. We found that B. fausti is active earlier than L. minutus , but it is generally found in lower abundance. The abundance of B. fausti had a positive relationship with mean annual precipitation, whereas L. minutus did not have any significant relationship with environmental predictors. Taken together, our study clarifies the life history of B. fausti in Canada in relation to L. minutus. If B. fausti precludes colonisation of seedheads by L. minutus but remains a less effective agent, continued range expansion of B. fausti may reduce the efficacy of C. diffusa biological control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".